L'Etat, C'est Gay: Taking the New Sexual Fascism Seriously

After months of collaboration with dozens of family activists, my blogging squad (English Manif) was able to publish a catalog of 300 real-life examples of totalitarian conduct by the gay marriage and gay parenting movement. For the convenience of readers, and to allow for discussion with common reference points, we have numbered the examples.The incidents range from small and episodic things, like #13 (banning the Dire Straits song “Money for Nothing”) and #72 (the social media efforts by gays against Gloria Estefan over her contract with Target department stores), to the grave and severe, such as #157 (the imprisonment of a young French man for opposing same-sex marriage) or #162 (the hiring of trained provocateurs to infiltrate the French Manif pour Tous). They range from bureaucratically serious, like #156 (the felonious release of confidential tax returns to the Human Rights Campaign by the IRS), to the emotionally manipulative, like #164 (GLAAD’s petty vendetta against gay novelist Brett Easton Ellis), to the outwardly violent, like #45 (Floyd Corkin’s attempt at mass murder at the Family Research Council).

We found 300 examples awfully fast – a bit too fast

Narrowing the list down to 300 was very difficult, because the more our team compiled, the more people came forward with additions upon additions. The whole project turned into something dizzying. Additional incidents will not be published until we update the “300 greatest hits” to make it 600, something that will likely happen in only a few months. Undeniable is the acceleration of this stunning phenomenon – something to which I will apply the term “homofascism,” knowing the term is given to caricature.

There is a mass movement aimed at stifling the autonomy of natural relationships – friendships, familial love, romantic love, human reverence for the divine – and subverting such relationships to the punitive power of an intrusive state. It is as sweeping and menacing as past isms, including fascism, to which it reveals a number of striking resemblances.

It is difficult to comprehend, partly because it operates so often with emotional subterfuge, and partly because it is unprecedented. It is less nationalistic than past fascisms, though more invasive and consuming because it polices interpersonal relationships and interior thoughts in a way that earlier police states did not. I have come to realize, though, that it is violent, even though we tend not to think of the movement as violent because many still stereotype gays as delicate, and the violence is usually carried out through the seemingly legitimate auspices of the state.

This strange fascism has grown under the guise of advocating for a marginalized and even obscure population – homosexuals and bisexuals – whose interests are in no way served by this movement, and who are themselves some of the people most vulnerable to repression by it. The stakes are huge, the urgency serious. We have to call it something, and its name should evoke the dramatic emergency it is presenting to the globe. So let’s just call it “homofascism” for simplicity’s sake.

L’Etat, C’est Gay

Go and read through the list. You may start to grasp how enormous the gay family movement is, how corrosive and especially how illiberal and anti-democratic it is. And also how dangerous it is – it has systematically subverted all the bailiwicks of patriarchal privilege that caused homosexuals their legitimate grievances in the century between the 1860s and the 1960s.

First, let us be honest with ourselves that the gay lobby is real and has incredible power. Certain names repeat eerily, especially the Human Rights Campaign, the Southern Poverty Law Center, the American Civil Liberties Union, and GLAAD.

These are organizations with enormous money. Texas professor George Yancey has documented for instance that the Southern Poverty Law Center alone has $256 million in assets. The plush Human Rights Campaign cradled the careers of Rufus Gifford and James Brewster, who got to become the ambassadors to Denmark and the Dominican Republic, even before the Obama administration held its LGBT confab in recent weeks and promised to appoint many more gay and transgender officials in the State Department. That’s just the tip of the iceberg. GLAAD and HRC, as we have seen, have the power to make or break people’s careers with their press releases and kiboshes.

And lest we think that the “T” in LGBT is really about penurious black transvestites forced into prostitution on urban street corners, consider the case of Obama’s appointee to commerce secretary – Penny Pritzker, the cousin of Jennifer Pritzker, “the first transgender billionaire.” As the Sun Times reports:

J.B. and Penny are sister and brother. Jennifer Pritzker is a cousin of the two. […] She is worth an estimated $1.7 billion.

The gay lobby has taken over the military, the police, the courts, the schools, medicine, the political parties on left and right, churches, public spaces, family, the press, business, and indeed many friendships.

This isn’t what was supposed to happen. As late as 2009, there were queer theorists like Kevin Floyd invoking radicals Lauren Berlant and Michael Warner with a straight face to proclaim that queer practices “counter the state.”1 If we account for lag time between writing a book and publishing it, we might suppose that Kevin Floyd could have penned the words “counter the state” ten years ago, when there were still parts of the state unconquered by the Gay Lobby.

Today, there is no more state for queers to counter, unless they want to engage in civil war within the gay community. Nowadays, l’état, c’est gay.

The Danger of Not Crying Wolf When There’s Really a Wolf

For any conservative who is not sure whether the gay marriage movement might be innocent or even sympathetic, and for any conservative who has to debate with people who are still naïve, this catalog might be a useful tool.

When I became seriously involved in the movement to champion children’s rights two years ago, I was coming from the secular point of view. My interest was primarily in preserving children’s bonds to their mothers and fathers. I was myself largely ignorant of how fascist the gay movement had become. Growing up in a lesbian household in the 1970s and 1980s, then spending time in a circle of Bronx drag queens in the 1990s, I still imagined that gay organizations represented beleaguered outsiders like the ones I had known, struggling to survive in a hostile world.

It is important for people to distinguish between gay individuals, many if not most of whom are still struggling, and the lobby that obeys the leadership of a very different generation of male homosexuals (lesbians and bisexuals are still largely marginal to the Gay Lobby). This new generation, which I like to call the helicopter class, consists of people who weren’t out of the closet when things were very hard for homosexuals – during the turbulent 1970s or the onset of AIDS in the 1980s – or were out of the closet only within a protected and pampered milieu, if they were actually born at all yet by 1990. The bigwigs of today’s homosexual elite, many younger children of extremely wealthy people, parachuted into the gay world from sanitized clouds in the atmosphere. They landed on queer soil when the mass of everyday folks had fought the big battles and earned their true war medals on the street. The parachuters got all of the glory and paid none of the shared sacrifice.

In one of the more bizarre twists of this movement’s history, the less activists actually struggled, the more bitter they felt about homophobia and the more vicious they became about fighting it by focusing on meaningless verbal slights (like #56, Phil Robertson saying unkind things about anal sex) or other gay people being less than in lockstep with them (such as #213, the war against gay writer Brandon Ambrosino for supposedly being too palatable to conservatives). I knew multitudes of poor gay people of color when I was younger. They have no dog in most of these political fights and really could not care less about what is said about them by someone who stars in a show called Duck Dynasty. I still have been unable to understand why the less gay people suffer, the more righteously they avenge themselves, though I made a stab at the issue in at least twoAmerican Thinker articles before.

Please forgive me for being clueless for so long

I’ve always been conservative but became committed to family issues only in the last two years. I spent the years between 1998 and 2012 largely away from gay media or gay debates, busy like so many others with the obligations of fatherhood and work. Having been governed by the military’s demand for discretion until my discharge in 2012, I was simply clueless about what the gay movement had become. The day that I received the papers from the Army and knew that I was free to speak on gay issues without repercussions, I sat down and began writing “Growing Up with Two Moms,” an essay about what it was really like to grow up with two lesbian caregivers and an absent father.

I began writing that essay in late July 2012, because I was honestly puzzled about the lack of testimonials from children raised by same-sex couples other than glowing endorsements from squeaky-clean paragons like Zach Wahls. I knew that most children of gay parents had dark stories to tell. The motive was not outrage over the gay marriage movement at that point so much as bewilderment over why more of these real-life experiences weren’t being narrated for the public, so people could make an informed decision about gay adoption.

The article was published on August 6, 2012, in a journal I’d never heard of, Public Discourse. Within a week I suddenly knew why so few children of gay parents had come forward. Dawn Stefanowicz, author of Out from Under, had been raised by a gay man and spoke out about the abuses and harms she witnessed to children in the gay community. The day my story came to light, she found my e-mail and sent me a heartfelt message, saying she would be there for me in what would likely be a coming storm.

What storm? I wondered...for about a day. Then the storm came. She was there for me – and that is, I suppose, what matters. Dissenting kids of same-sex couples have to stick together, because we are the most vulnerable in all these debates, having survived the gay guardians who denied us opposite-sex parents, and then having to confront a gay lobby determined to abuse us into silence again so we don’t ruin their political charades.

The thought crosses my mind quite often: could I have made a difference if I’d come forward and spoken out in 2004? In 2000? In 1994? Homofascism feeds on silence. The less you confront it, the more it hunts you down and strikes at you. It is a strange beast. Perhaps if conservatives had stopped being so afraid of offending people and taken this threat seriously twenty years ago, many of the victims catalogued in our 300 list would not have been prey for the search-and-destroy missions of the gay lobby.

But regrets do little. We need to move forward. My allies’ purpose in archiving the history of homofascism is to provide a resource, to make sure that people on our side know how high the stakes are, and how false the veneers of the other side are. We are facing a vicious, lethal enemy, and we have to fight back accordingly. Ever forward.

After months of collaboration with dozens of family activists, my blogging squad (English Manif) was able to publish a catalog of 300 real-life examples of totalitarian conduct by the gay marriage and gay parenting movement. For the convenience of readers, and to allow for discussion with common reference points, we have numbered the examples.

The incidents range from small and episodic things, like #13 (banning the Dire Straits song “Money for Nothing”) and #72 (the social media efforts by gays against Gloria Estefan over her contract with Target department stores), to the grave and severe, such as #157 (the imprisonment of a young French man for opposing same-sex marriage) or #162 (the hiring of trained provocateurs to infiltrate the French Manif pour Tous). They range from bureaucratically serious, like #156 (the felonious release of confidential tax returns to the Human Rights Campaign by the IRS), to the emotionally manipulative, like #164 (GLAAD’s petty vendetta against gay novelist Brett Easton Ellis), to the outwardly violent, like #45 (Floyd Corkin’s attempt at mass murder at the Family Research Council).

We found 300 examples awfully fast – a bit too fast

Narrowing the list down to 300 was very difficult, because the more our team compiled, the more people came forward with additions upon additions. The whole project turned into something dizzying. Additional incidents will not be published until we update the “300 greatest hits” to make it 600, something that will likely happen in only a few months. Undeniable is the acceleration of this stunning phenomenon – something to which I will apply the term “homofascism,” knowing the term is given to caricature.

There is a mass movement aimed at stifling the autonomy of natural relationships – friendships, familial love, romantic love, human reverence for the divine – and subverting such relationships to the punitive power of an intrusive state. It is as sweeping and menacing as past isms, including fascism, to which it reveals a number of striking resemblances.

It is difficult to comprehend, partly because it operates so often with emotional subterfuge, and partly because it is unprecedented. It is less nationalistic than past fascisms, though more invasive and consuming because it polices interpersonal relationships and interior thoughts in a way that earlier police states did not. I have come to realize, though, that it is violent, even though we tend not to think of the movement as violent because many still stereotype gays as delicate, and the violence is usually carried out through the seemingly legitimate auspices of the state.

This strange fascism has grown under the guise of advocating for a marginalized and even obscure population – homosexuals and bisexuals – whose interests are in no way served by this movement, and who are themselves some of the people most vulnerable to repression by it. The stakes are huge, the urgency serious. We have to call it something, and its name should evoke the dramatic emergency it is presenting to the globe. So let’s just call it “homofascism” for simplicity’s sake.

L’Etat, C’est Gay

Go and read through the list. You may start to grasp how enormous the gay family movement is, how corrosive and especially how illiberal and anti-democratic it is. And also how dangerous it is – it has systematically subverted all the bailiwicks of patriarchal privilege that caused homosexuals their legitimate grievances in the century between the 1860s and the 1960s.

First, let us be honest with ourselves that the gay lobby is real and has incredible power. Certain names repeat eerily, especially the Human Rights Campaign, the Southern Poverty Law Center, the American Civil Liberties Union, and GLAAD.

These are organizations with enormous money. Texas professor George Yancey has documented for instance that the Southern Poverty Law Center alone has $256 million in assets. The plush Human Rights Campaign cradled the careers of Rufus Gifford and James Brewster, who got to become the ambassadors to Denmark and the Dominican Republic, even before the Obama administration held its LGBT confab in recent weeks and promised to appoint many more gay and transgender officials in the State Department. That’s just the tip of the iceberg. GLAAD and HRC, as we have seen, have the power to make or break people’s careers with their press releases and kiboshes.

And lest we think that the “T” in LGBT is really about penurious black transvestites forced into prostitution on urban street corners, consider the case of Obama’s appointee to commerce secretary – Penny Pritzker, the cousin of Jennifer Pritzker, “the first transgender billionaire.” As the Sun Times reports:

J.B. and Penny are sister and brother. Jennifer Pritzker is a cousin of the two. […] She is worth an estimated $1.7 billion.

The gay lobby has taken over the military, the police, the courts, the schools, medicine, the political parties on left and right, churches, public spaces, family, the press, business, and indeed many friendships.

This isn’t what was supposed to happen. As late as 2009, there were queer theorists like Kevin Floyd invoking radicals Lauren Berlant and Michael Warner with a straight face to proclaim that queer practices “counter the state.”1 If we account for lag time between writing a book and publishing it, we might suppose that Kevin Floyd could have penned the words “counter the state” ten years ago, when there were still parts of the state unconquered by the Gay Lobby.

Today, there is no more state for queers to counter, unless they want to engage in civil war within the gay community. Nowadays, l’état, c’est gay.

The Danger of Not Crying Wolf When There’s Really a Wolf

For any conservative who is not sure whether the gay marriage movement might be innocent or even sympathetic, and for any conservative who has to debate with people who are still naïve, this catalog might be a useful tool.

When I became seriously involved in the movement to champion children’s rights two years ago, I was coming from the secular point of view. My interest was primarily in preserving children’s bonds to their mothers and fathers. I was myself largely ignorant of how fascist the gay movement had become. Growing up in a lesbian household in the 1970s and 1980s, then spending time in a circle of Bronx drag queens in the 1990s, I still imagined that gay organizations represented beleaguered outsiders like the ones I had known, struggling to survive in a hostile world.

It is important for people to distinguish between gay individuals, many if not most of whom are still struggling, and the lobby that obeys the leadership of a very different generation of male homosexuals (lesbians and bisexuals are still largely marginal to the Gay Lobby). This new generation, which I like to call the helicopter class, consists of people who weren’t out of the closet when things were very hard for homosexuals – during the turbulent 1970s or the onset of AIDS in the 1980s – or were out of the closet only within a protected and pampered milieu, if they were actually born at all yet by 1990. The bigwigs of today’s homosexual elite, many younger children of extremely wealthy people, parachuted into the gay world from sanitized clouds in the atmosphere. They landed on queer soil when the mass of everyday folks had fought the big battles and earned their true war medals on the street. The parachuters got all of the glory and paid none of the shared sacrifice.

In one of the more bizarre twists of this movement’s history, the less activists actually struggled, the more bitter they felt about homophobia and the more vicious they became about fighting it by focusing on meaningless verbal slights (like #56, Phil Robertson saying unkind things about anal sex) or other gay people being less than in lockstep with them (such as #213, the war against gay writer Brandon Ambrosino for supposedly being too palatable to conservatives). I knew multitudes of poor gay people of color when I was younger. They have no dog in most of these political fights and really could not care less about what is said about them by someone who stars in a show called Duck Dynasty. I still have been unable to understand why the less gay people suffer, the more righteously they avenge themselves, though I made a stab at the issue in at least twoAmerican Thinker articles before.

Please forgive me for being clueless for so long

I’ve always been conservative but became committed to family issues only in the last two years. I spent the years between 1998 and 2012 largely away from gay media or gay debates, busy like so many others with the obligations of fatherhood and work. Having been governed by the military’s demand for discretion until my discharge in 2012, I was simply clueless about what the gay movement had become. The day that I received the papers from the Army and knew that I was free to speak on gay issues without repercussions, I sat down and began writing “Growing Up with Two Moms,” an essay about what it was really like to grow up with two lesbian caregivers and an absent father.

I began writing that essay in late July 2012, because I was honestly puzzled about the lack of testimonials from children raised by same-sex couples other than glowing endorsements from squeaky-clean paragons like Zach Wahls. I knew that most children of gay parents had dark stories to tell. The motive was not outrage over the gay marriage movement at that point so much as bewilderment over why more of these real-life experiences weren’t being narrated for the public, so people could make an informed decision about gay adoption.

The article was published on August 6, 2012, in a journal I’d never heard of, Public Discourse. Within a week I suddenly knew why so few children of gay parents had come forward. Dawn Stefanowicz, author of Out from Under, had been raised by a gay man and spoke out about the abuses and harms she witnessed to children in the gay community. The day my story came to light, she found my e-mail and sent me a heartfelt message, saying she would be there for me in what would likely be a coming storm.

What storm? I wondered...for about a day. Then the storm came. She was there for me – and that is, I suppose, what matters. Dissenting kids of same-sex couples have to stick together, because we are the most vulnerable in all these debates, having survived the gay guardians who denied us opposite-sex parents, and then having to confront a gay lobby determined to abuse us into silence again so we don’t ruin their political charades.

The thought crosses my mind quite often: could I have made a difference if I’d come forward and spoken out in 2004? In 2000? In 1994? Homofascism feeds on silence. The less you confront it, the more it hunts you down and strikes at you. It is a strange beast. Perhaps if conservatives had stopped being so afraid of offending people and taken this threat seriously twenty years ago, many of the victims catalogued in our 300 list would not have been prey for the search-and-destroy missions of the gay lobby.

But regrets do little. We need to move forward. My allies’ purpose in archiving the history of homofascism is to provide a resource, to make sure that people on our side know how high the stakes are, and how false the veneers of the other side are. We are facing a vicious, lethal enemy, and we have to fight back accordingly. Ever forward.